I've written a few posts before and now I'm back with some observations I made whilst dueling last night. I played for about 3 hours, against all of the classes mostly in 4 player FFA. Before I begin, I want to add the my barb probably has more EHP than your typical character, and that I am by no means saying that these are the best abilities to use. Every player will have a different playstyle, and every character will have different needs based on their gear.

I jumped into my first duel-fest completely unprepared. I had done some theorycrafting before-hand, thinking I would need lots of damage, some mobility, a stun or two, and a way to get fury. Turns out Battle Rage: Into the Fray is terrible, using Bash? nah, Ruthless? couldn't be further off. I was following the popular trend of getting demolished very quickly, one-shot kills and so forth.

The first thing you want to do is abandon all DPS passives and buffs. Now, with all the leg room to work with, start playing around with any ability that seems interesting.

d3up Here's a sample of a build I was using towards the end of the night.

I want to go over the passives first.

Superstition -- This one really surprised me. The damage reduction is self-explanatory, but the fury generation was insane. This passive alone often kept me topped off on fury. The downside is that it's not very effective against monks or barbs.

Relentless -- Not super necessary, but added a lot of fun for me. Survivability becomes insane below the 20% threshold, it seemed to couple very nicely with health regen, and the Inspiring Presence passive. A lot of times this would be save me just enough to let me slip around a corner and get my health back, or get a cooldown back up.

Inspiring Presence -- Again, based on playstyle. I found this one fun in the FFA style matches, since I was lacking any sort of health regen in between bouts. Not going to be useful if you plan on having 2-second fights, but very useful if you have enough defenses to last a long while.

Juggernaut -- A 4th option to mix in, conditionally useful based on your opponents' builds. I used Juggernaut against WDs, Barbs, and a monk who was using EF. One barb in particular used weapon throw with the stun passive, and this would work well with that.

For the active abilities, it's really going involve playing around a bunch and finding ones that make sense for you.

War Cry:Invigorate -- pairs nicely with Inspiring Presence and Relentless.

Leap -- This one is tough. Leap feels so good and useful when it works, but the dueling area has tons of obstacles that make it difficult to use. You're also going to want to be weaving around those obstacles to LoS, so again Leap becomes difficult to use. I played with Death from Above and Call of Arreat, both are good choices. Call of Arreat was really good for DHs, but I'm assuming all ranged this is useful. DFA is very hard to aim, though still usefull for all fights.

Overpower:Curshing Advance -- I solely used this for damage mitigation. I think the reflect portion is probably too small to make a difference, but against some glass cannons it will help. The short cooldown makes the ability very useful.

Ignore Pain -- I don't think I died with this ability up. Obviously pretty useful.

"But Scar, how do I kill my opponent?" This is probably the area that I changed up the most. But overall I found that everyone is so squishy, I would sometimes kill players with the basic attack! I mixed and matched 4 abilities, Bash, Seismic Slam, HotA, and Rend. First off let me say that I have banned myself from using Rend. This ability is very very strong in duels, it will kill your opponent and it cannot be dodged. So if you're afraid of getting crushed in the arena, start with this and just focus your efforts on getting close to other players without dying.

As for the others, I found that Bash wasn't necessary unless I was really struggling with fury - It might be useful in a 1v1 against another barb, but if you get close enough to hit a DH or a wizard, you're going to wish you smashed 'em instead of bashed 'em. HotA is very good, it is my primary attack against melee and can one-shot ranged. The rune is up to you, I used The Devil's Anvil, but didn't notice the effects very much. Finally Seismic Slam I find is often spammable. It was my attack of choice against DHs. The Strength from Earth rune is useful here.

Other thoughts::: In general fights felt short, but probably lasted in the 5-20 second range which is much longer than 1 second one-shots I kept hearing about on reddit. I felt very hard to kill most of the time (even without ignore pain), which I really liked. I was surprised at how squishy mostly everyone was. Dodge plays a huge role in dueling - everyone really dodges quite a bit. There are a lot of death-saving abilities that other classes have, so it's important to get the first kill, hide quickly and expect to get the true kill shortly after. Storm Armor scares me.

I would love to hear other barbarian thoughts and observations! I saw a few scary WotB barbs, and ones with weapon throw and ancient spear as well. I'm also curious on fury generation for when superstition isn't viable.

Nice to see someone actually thinking about PVP builds unlike the sheep that are crying about how their 1337 pve WW barb is getting absolutely spanked in pvp so all other classes are OP and must be nerfed.

Weapon throw w/ stun is pretty good, you can get a decent stun chain off, but fury cost becomes a problem without any reduction gear. Also pets can get in the way and you become useless.

I really enjoyed Seismic Slam with the stun rune as well. The added cost isn't a big factor if you're in a scenario with lots of fury generation.

For a bit I was using Seismic Slam with the -15 cost rune paired with Battle Rage instead of HotA. I didn't need to worry about closing the distance with only having the one attack, and felt strong enough to not need to smash to finish.

Finally I noticed Superstition is very powerful with DoTs, I believe every time the DoT does damage it can proc the fury generation. You know - the bajillion small numbers that popup if you're getting reflected. In other words if a WD puts Haunt on you, you can't lose fury.

Speaking of ancient spear. With the appropriate passive (with a name that is eluding my mind at the moment) it's cooldown will reset upon crit. I saw some video when a barbarian happened to utilize this versus a wizard where he landed a spear. Subsequently the wizard teleported out of harms way. However the initial spear critted and previously mentioned wizard was once again, this time helplessly, dragged back into the teeth of combat.

This may be somewhat too situational and crit reliant. But it's worth considering as an option :P

on second thought though. The wizard could have remedied this by using the illustionist passive since the hit form the second spear would probably exceed 15% of his max HP hence resetting the teleport cooldown.... gentlemen we are back at square zero...

Anyhow this is where the whole rock, paper, scissor dynamic that Blizzard spoke of pre release comes into play :P there'll always be a build to trump the cookie cutters (or at least we'll hope there'll be)

I found that fury generation was an issue for me when I tried barb last night. For instance, the other classes have self-regenerating resources, so they simply keep their distance while my fury slowly withers down.